Treading The Mill Tuesdays Chapter 7 – Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion
Chapter 7 – Approaching The Powers – Part 2 and Conclusion
Introduction | Hallowing the Compass | SpellCrafting | Censing the Sacred | Entering the Twilyte pt 1 | Entering the Twilyte pt 2 | SpiritWorking pt 1 | SpiritWorking pt 2 | Approaching the Powers pt 1
Hello dears! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? The only defense I can offer is that I am sick and fucking tired of this book and Nigel Pearson and his bullshit. I’m tired of it, but I’ve got some free time and I want to see this nonsense through to the bitter end. So let’s get started.
Pearson now turns his attention to the Goddess. He opens this section with a five-stanza poem/hymn/devotional piece which I wouldn’t consider out of place in any of my rituals. After this he once again has to stop and tear other people down:
“The Goddess, as perceived in Traditional Witchcraft, is not the “Triple Moon Goddess” of Robert Graves’ “White Goddess”, so beloved of modern pagans and Wiccans. Neither is she solely the fertile Earth Mother of so-called “Neolithic” belief.”
Venus figurine found at Çatalhöyük in 2016
I am sure you will be absolutely shocked to see that in the next few pages Pearson describes a divinity who is curiously similar to the capricious and cruel deity Graves depicts in The White Goddess. He sort of flip-flops around a bit, and uses phrases that readers in classical mythology will recognize – there are snippets of the Cyme Aretology of Isis, the statue of Isis at Sais, the Fates, and others. He also says:
“No one depiction of the Goddess can fully express Her powers and nature but Her essence exists in all the goddesses invented by Man – for all have been.”
This sort of flies in the face of his earlier complains that only idiots believe ‘All gods are one god’, but consistency has evidently never been one of Pearson’s virtues. He also states “it is from her that we all issue and to Her that we shall all return at the end of times” which sounds perilously close to that line from the Charge of the Goddess: “From me all things proceed and unto me they must return.” Funny how that keeps happening! He complains again that “She bears little resemblance to the bright, loving, and caring Goddess of modern pagan practice.” Sorry folks! Your Goddess just isn’t edgy enough!
CRAWLING IN MY SKINNNNNN
Pearson states that there are two titles for the Witch Goddess, the Great Queen and the Black Goddess. Let’s take a look and see what he says:
The Great Queen
This is a deity of “Life, love, sexuality, death and the Land”. I’m not really sure how this is different from how many modern pagans view the Goddess, but OK, sure, whatever. She is concerned with things that pertain to being alive. Pearson’s descriptions here really remind me of The White Goddess, in that Gravesian “The goddess fucks you and then destroys you” way, up to and including a comparison to the sow who eats her own farrow. ”To feed and nurture her cub, the vixen must kill the fluffy bunny and present it with blood-stained muzzle.” The fluffy bunny. I’ve been saying this for years, but it bears repeating – a lot of traddies really, really remind me of the kind of person who spent a lot of time yelling that fluff-bunnies would be the death of Wicca back in the early aughts.
He also identifies the Great Queen with the Land in the same way a lot of books associate a queen with the land, you know, like you read in books on Celtic mythology, but also identifies her with the inexorable forces of nature.
Next Pearson presents an exercise to form a relationship with this aspect of divinity, which he calls ‘Addressing the Dame.’ The title of this makes me want to scream for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has been reading my Tumblr. It entails making a sort of image or representation out of found natural materials in which the spirit of the Great Queen may dwell to which one may make prayers or petitions (but remember, as he mentioned earlier, witches do not worship deities). Once the framework of the representation is done you make regular trips to gather more materials to add to it, veiling it with a black cloth between trips. After a year and a day the work is completed and you will have a finished link to the Great Queen in all her faces and aspects, as it were, collected over an entire cycle of the seasons. He stresses that this should not be undertaken lightly (which is correct) but I feel like there should be some instruction on what to do if the image needs to be taken apart or destroyed for some reason. It’s not a terrible idea, but he also doesn’t give many suggestions for what to do with this (should it be veiled at all times, for example?) but I feel like it would be an interesting exercise were it fleshed out a bit.
The Black Goddess
This aspect of the Goddess functions more as what I would say is more like modern pagan views of the Crone, the mysteries of the night, the Underworld, the spaces between the stars (mostly void, partly stars) and behind the Moon. He provides a description of a spiritual experience he had during the contemplation of the Black Goddess.
Pearson also states that the Black Goddess is the one who creates “the next shapes of force to be unleased on the world.” She is also a deity who makes magic work, if I am reading this correctly – “It is to this aspect of the Goddess that we appeal for any of the grand magics, the great life-shaping and life-changing works that we would attempt. These are not to be approached without great consideration and meditation beforehand but, when we are certain that it is the right thing to do – and Traditional Crafters do meddle and change things – then it is to the great Black Goddess that we apply for the permission and power to carry out the work.”
I’m not like other girls. I meddle and change things.
We are also presented with an exercise meant to form a connection with the Black Goddess and also find out where your life is going. This involves constructing a threefold Circle of salt, ashes, and a mixture of water, wine, vinegar, and salt, addressing four aspects of the Black Goddess at the four quarters, consecrating water, and then scrying into it. It’s not a bad working!
Next up is a section titled Approaching the Power. This is a place where Pearson contradicts himself quite a bit, saying that some witches actually do believe that the God and Goddess come from one ultimate Power, which he suggests could be a Goddess who birthed the one he calls the Goddess, a sort of primeval creatrix like Chaos. Alternately, some may view this ultimate Power as the witches’ Devil, a being of rebellion and cunning and disorderliness. And yet some may view this Power as a union of the God and Goddess, which he describes in fairly conventional heterosexist terms. Nevermind that earlier Pearson shit all over Dion Fortune’s ‘all gods are one god’ maxim. Like I said, consistency is not his forte.
He also seems to believe that Traditional Witches existed historically: “Certainly they gathered together upon occasions when fellows were known in the vicinity and certainly they swapped lore and instructed each other in their individual ways of knowledge.”
He points out that dedication and initiation are separate things (correct) and provides a ritual for self-dedication. This is not a process I can disagree with! Initiation, as he states, is something bestowed upon you by another, be it a group of people you are joining or a spiritual experience. His self-dedication ritual contains elements that will be very familiar to anyone who has read anything on the subject – blessing with the four Elements, quarter calls, making a declaration of dedication. His ritual has some actions and language clearly borrowed from trial records from the European witch hysteria.
The closing of the ritual is conventional, and at this point he ends the book – no further information, no afterword or conclusion. Our long national nightmare is over.
Conclusion
It’s over! It’s finished! I finally got around to completing my chapter-by-chapter teardown on this shitty, shitty book. I don’t like his writing style. I don’t like his bad editing. I don’t like Pearson’s bad habit of making portentous, ominous statements with no follow-up, explanation, or further detail. I don’t like his shameless pillaging from other writers, the complete and total lack of footnotes and sources, or his constant whining about how awful those Wiccans are while lifting ideas, ritual practices, and theology from the religion wholesale. I’ve said it before and it bears repeating – there is nothing in this book that would be out of place in a conventional book on Wicca, nothing.
I’m still angry that some old fart Gardnerian Third Degree who had been initiated by Buckland who I met in the old Witches’ Chat Network chatroom spent so much time verbally fellating this book, to the extent that I actually found a copy of it, because this book sucks. It is tepid, bland, very pedestrian writing, and while it has some actual rituals and workings in it, the way that they’re presented and the pointless ramblings and incessant whining about other pagans that fills the pages between those rituals and workings made this an unpleasant read. Should you purchase this book? No. Should you illegally download this book mysteriously find a .pdf of it on your computer somehow? Also no. There are infinitely better books out there that won’t be as much of a waste of your time.
Consumnatum est.
